“I think we're in another moment …” documentary filmmaker Giselle Bailey paused, thinking of the most tactful thing she could say. “I'm going to say ‘of rebirth’ because I think it's easy to lean into how hard it is.”
Bailey was reflecting on the current state of Black television. Multiple TV productions she shadowed when she came on to direct Seen & Heard — the Issa Rae executive produced two-part docuseries that traces the history of Black television — were canceled as she was putting the documentary together. Shows like Rap Sh!t, a comedy series following two women MCs, and Random Acts of Flyness, a surrealist sketch comedy show led by Terence Nance.
In April this year, CBS sparked backlash after canceling three Black-led shows in one day: spinoffs of The Equalizer starring Queen Latifah and The Neighborhood featuring Cedric the Entertainer, along with Damon Wayans Sr. and Jr.’s comedy Poppa’s House.
Last month, the New York Times published an op-ed titled “Hollywood is ‘Hot, Horny and White’ Again.” In it, Sharon Waxman wrote, “The entertainment industry is nothing if not finely attuned to the social and cultural signals that affect the box office. ... The pendulum that swung all the way left after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, with among other things the installation of DEI leaders at the studios, started to go the other way in 2023.”
“I think it is very hard right now. Opportunities are rather limited,” director Bailey reflected. “And also, I see from studying this history that this is another time of ingenuity. And I feel that with my peers — other Black filmmakers — are really thinking about, ‘How do I wanna tell this story? Where can I distribute it? How do I do it myself? How do we partner? How do we collaborate?'”
These are the questions that come up during the two-part docuseries that features interviews with icons who have shaped the television landscape, including Oprah, Tyler Perry, Shonda Rimes, Issa Rae, Debbie Allen and many more.
‘Seen & Heard’ director on what the history of Black TV can teach us about Hollywood's priorities
The booms and busts of Black television
The first episode of Seen & Heard highlights the history of Black entertainment as early as the Chitlin circuit of the 1930s, an informal network of venues where Black musicians, comedians and other entertainers performed for Black audiences during Jim Crow era segregation.
These venues were mostly in the eastern, southern and upper Midwest U.S., but the story of Black television takes place here in L.A., in the world of board rooms and sound stages from the '50s to today.
“LA is the central hub, the womb, the battleground of the story that we're telling,” Bailey said.
Bailey noticed there was a cycle to Black TV There would be pockets of time when Black shows were popular, like in the '70s, when the prolific producer and writer Norman Lear created and championed sitcoms like Sanford and Son, Good Times and The Jeffersons — and then those pockets would close.
How the Black TV Renaissance of the '90s and 2000s waned
To understand this cycle, Seen & Heard explores what happened in the '90s and early 2000s, when there was a huge renaissance of Black shows on TV.
“In the 90s, 'UPN (United Paramount Network) and WB (Warner Brothers) had many of the Black shows that come to define the era,” Bailey said.
Shows like Girlfriends, Moesha and Sister Sister, which amassed large audiences and helped their respective networks establish their voice and loyal viewership. But then…
“At a certain point in early 2000s, UPN and the WB merged and created the CW. During that acquisition, they started moving to what often is called a ‘mainstream appeal,’” Bailey said. “And so that leaves a lot of things behind, including things that are considered a creative risk — that tends to be voices of people of color.”
Throughout the aughts, CW became known for shows like Gossip Girl rather than Moesha. In Seen & Heard, Ralph Farquhar, co-creator of Moesha said, "Our shows have systematically been used to pump networks since we've been on TV. To pump up the ratings, to pump up the network. And then when they get what they need, they let it go.”
Farquhar also called out Fox — another network — that started running In Living Color, a comedy sketch show starring Keenan Ivory Wayans, in 1990, “until, one day when they bought NFL football and they decided to get rid of everybody. Football meant white males to them. They cancelled everything Black 'cause they considered the Black audience a downscale demographic."
“It is a bit of whiplash,” Bailey said. “Because the most popular shows went from being very Black to being very not in a span of just a couple of years.”
What to do with a fickle Hollywood system?
In conducting interviews for Seen & Heard, Bailey noticed a theme start to emerge: Black creatives feeling it was necessary to navigate or bypass the studio system.
“There's controlling how something's getting made, which community is making it, how is that reflected on the screen? […] All of those things are really rooted in having real control of the thing. And the best way to do that is to own the content,” Bailey said.
In the documentary, Tyler Perry gives a tour of the studio he owns with multiple sound stages named after legendary Black performers like Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg and Sidney Poitier. The documentary also features Oprah talking about the importance of owning her own network: OWN, the Oprah Winfrey network.
But even non-billionaire creatives in the documentary talk about creating or contributing to a system that is not bankrolled by white executives. After Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness was canceled, Nance came together with other Black creatives in Baltimore to open Lalibela ,a space with sound stages and equipment where Black creators can make their own productions without waiting for a studio greenlight.
“Terence’s Lalibela is really exciting to me,” Bailey said. “Those are the kinds of projects that I believe [are] going to create another kind of renaissance.”
